Distance
by jezebelz
Summary: Rose keeps her gaze trained on the window, terrain rushing by like water. Which, she supposes, is appropriate, given that every time she takes a breath she feels like she's drowning.
1. Chapter 1

_Author's Note: You know, if I'd written about the Doctor turning his hand into a clone and sending it off with Rose in the alternate universe, it would have been laughable. And now it's canon. Funny, that. (Post Journey's End.)_

He's not talking much, which is weird and wrong and out of place, just like he is. Rose keeps her gaze trained on the window, terrain rushing by like water. Which, she supposes, is appropriate, given that every time she takes a breath she feels like she's drowning.

He reaches for her, like he did on the beach, and she looks down to see the fingers of the hand that was cut off by the Sycorax grasping hers. She remembers how squeamish she had been to hold the re-grown hand when he'd first proffered it, fingers wriggling, her new new Doctor, and she grins spastically up at the face of his replacement.

"This is a bit weird," she says, a hysterical edge of laughter in her voice. She disengages her fingers from his, trying not to notice the way his face flashes with hurt and resignation, though maybe not that order. She can still hear his voice - not _his_ voice, but the voice she'd dreamed of, waited for, sought out. An almost imperceptible cringe; does it need saying? _You left me_, she thinks, turning her head to the window again. _You left me again, and I came all that way._

Jackie turns in her seat, flicking a glance at Rose and then opening a volley of chatter at the Doctor. Not the Doctor. "What are we calling you?" Rose asks, her voice cutting smoothly across her mother's.

The car is silent while the question is considered. Rose is pretty sure he's looking at her, but she doesn't lift her eyes. The back of the seat in front of her is textured like skin, and she wants to kiss him again, perversely. An angry kiss, one that involves teeth and claws and leaves both of them bloody.

"I don't know," he says, finally, and Jackie comes back to life, flinging suggestions at him while Rose goes back to her window, watching the imaginary distance between her and her Doctor spiraling out like forever.


	2. Chapter 2

It starts in her living room, of all places. So mundane and domestic, a living room. A room for living. You need a whole room for that, you humans, although now he supposes it's we humans, isn't it? Not that he's human, exactly. There isn't a designation for what he is, and that's quite strange. He used to know. It used to be simple, if things like that can be simple, and now it's practically a lecture on trans-dimensional multi-species biology.

Some of this he has said out loud.

She's watching him the way she watched him on the beach, and he feels muted under her scrutiny, like he should wait in the corner.

"So who are you, then?"

He blinks, and for a moment he doesn't know how to respond. Like maybe he has misjudged how well she's taking this, how completely she's been able to wrap her brain around what's happened. "I'm the Doctor."

"He's the Doctor," she says, gesturing vaguely over her shoulder, and he stops himself from telling her that Bad Wolf Bay is somewhere in the opposite direction. It doesn't matter, really, in the end. She's right, and she's wrong, and direction has nothing to do with it.

"Semantics," he says instead. "That's the problem with your language. You lot don't have scenarios like this, so you don't have the words for it. Like the Inuit, not having a word for snow, or the Acacians, with no word for the color blue. Never seen the color blue, the Acacians, can you imagine?" She isn't smiling, and it's so like the time on the TARDIS after his regeneration, trying to charm her with the hopping. "Anyway, words. Instantaneous biological metacrisis comes close, but that's rather dry, don't you think? I think I prefer new new new Doctor."

Her body angles away from him, and when she speaks, it sounds like it's coming from a distance. "I knew it, when he asked me if it needed saying," she begins, and his cheerful enthusiasm - faked, for the most part, but still - wilts. "I knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he was my Doctor, and I'd traveled all that way to find him again." She takes a breath, which shudders in a way he doesn't like. "I knew it because he was leaving me. Just like that time on Satellite Five, right? Sending me home for my own good. Only this isn't my home."

"You're parsing," he says, swallowing. He still can't look at her. "Don't parse. Whether he said it or I said it, it's still the truth. The I. I love you."

"I know," she says, and she reaches out to touch his face with fingers that are anything but comforting. He does look at her then, wondering if it's an ironic _I_, wondering if she's aware that she's parroting him. The look on her face is kind, and flat, and disconnected. "And that's how I know you aren't him."

She leaves.

He stands, very still, until he hears her in the kitchen, running water and banging the kettle against the stove. Tea, then.

Her flat is the way he would have imagined it to be, if he'd let himself imagine such things. A little cleaner, maybe, a little less pink. He remembers her bedroom at the Powell Estates, the fuschia walls and candyfloss duvet, and suddenly he remembers Donna's face at the door of the TARDIS, her eyes too clever and too bright. He has an image of himself laying her carefully on a bed in her mother's house, and he knows. Donna. And what he's done.

She couldn't sustain it. Obviously. Human, human brain, like Rose with the heart of the TARDIS. He hadn't thought about it before, but now it's all he can see. And would he have let Donna die? Would he have been able to watch her burn like an overheated motor? Or would he have taken the choice from her, made the only decision _he_ could live with even as she begged him to stop?

_You called me dangerous,_ he thinks, for the first time feeling separate, and his whole body is thrumming, desperate to be anywhere but here.

Rose returns with the tea, setting his on the coffee table rather than handing it to him. Which is fine, if slightly awkward, as though he's an uninvited guest and she's just being polite. He pushes the image of Donna's face out of his head, takes the cup in his hand. Here and now he is with Rose, and he smiles brightly at her before he takes a gulp, burning his tongue.


	3. Chapter 3

Rose gets him a napkin and watches while he splutters and coughs. He looks the same, that's the hell of it. It's just the situation, the mundanity of _having a spot of tea in her flat_, which makes him seem out of place. He looks like the man she loves, and coughs like the man she loves, and makes a horrible, twisting face just like the man she loves when he sees he's dribbled all over his suit jacket.

His face wavers and she's not going to cry again, she's not. What good did crying ever do?

"It's just, I don't know how to make sense of this," Rose mutters, not quite as an apology. What she doesn't add: _and I don't know if I want to try._ "I get the regeneration thing, I do, but what are you? Made from him, but not him? I wanted," but she doesn't finish, just focuses on his mouth and worries at her own lip with her teeth.

"You might as well ask yourself where consciousness begins, or what makes a man," he says, looking warily at the teacup before taking another, smaller, sip. This one goes better than the first and he seems inordinately pleased. "I think, therefore I am, but what am I? A carbon copy of the electrical impulses that make up the Doctor, or the Doctor himself? I say himself, but I mean myself, or at least I think I do, and that's the problem, isn't it? I think. I can still tell you the exact texture of the grass on New Earth, even though I've never touched it with these hands, or the color of the skies over Gallifrey even though I've never seen them with these eyes. I look at you" - but he doesn't, his eyes slide past her face and fix on the wall - "and I know the clever tilt of your head and the way the room lights up when you smile and the feeling of your hand in mine." She looks down, sees his fingers twitch, and she doesn't reach for them for the same reason he doesn't reach for her. "I can still hear the screams of my people as I let them die." He stops, swallows. Is silent for a moment. "But I didn't do that, did I? Not me, not the man in front of you."

"I don't - I don't know." Rose opens her mouth, closes it. She doesn't know if she can do the existential thing just now, not when the existential crisis is standing awkwardly in her living room. "No? Yes? What does it matter, if you still remember it?"

He's not listening, of course, is already scrambling to catch his mouth up with his head. "Because if I am that man, if I followed that exact path and thought those exact thoughts, then how can I be here? How could I have said those words to you, when I never said them before?"

That's the question, isn't it? "It's not like you had a chance, did you? What with the 'quite right, too' and the long, dramatic pauses. Time Lord, right? You'd think you could keep better track of two minutes."

He grins then, wry and tetchy and gorgeous, and for a breathless second she thinks she can do this. Just forget that he's not quite what she wanted, pretend that the TARDIS is parked out back and there is no other Doctor swallowing hard and walking away from her on a beach in Norway. But the instant she completes that thought it's shattered.

He sees it. He must. "Lucky for me, I got a second chance," he says softly.

"Did you, now."

"I answered. I was born of blood and death, but I was never cruel enough to deny you the one thing you asked of me, Rose Tyler."

"And what was that?" She stares at him, her eyes smeared and furious. It surprises her, the fury, because if he's not the Doctor then what has he done to piss her off? And yet. "A favor? A consolation prize? An excuse for a good snog?"

She can read the shock on his face. "What?"

"I used to think about it all the time. Kissing him. And you, it's like," her breath hitches, voice too high by at least an octave, "it's like all those times I would kiss Mickey and picture him, and I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyway."

"Right," he says. "Well! It's a good thing we didn't bring Mickey, then." She recognizes the look on his face, his dark eyes that are suddenly too old, the shoulders drawn together and close to his neck. There's a part of her that wants to go to him, put a hand on either side of his face and really _look_ at him, say it's going to be okay and mean it. But it's only a part.

"I hate this," she says after a while. Her tea's gone cold.

"It's not exactly a picnic for me." He scratches the back of his neck, a gesture so like her Doctor that Rose wants to slap him. Then he stands straighter, cutting his eyes to her for a fraction of a second. "Although, the kissing. I didn't hate that."

She mutters something that might have been "Neither did I," but doesn't stop to think what that might mean. The kiss is still fresh in her mind, the moment when she knew the Doctor was leaving and knew that it was killing him and knew that this was the only way she could make it work. Because he had to go, didn't he? Fabric of time and space, integrity of the walls between the universes, and all that. The fact that it must have hurt, watching her snog the ears off his double, well.

Just a few hours before. He'd wrapped his arms around her after the regeneration that wasn't, the potential new new new Doctor still a severed hand bobbing in a chemical bath. She remembers his arms, his chin hooked over her shoulder, her momentary feeling of absolute, timeless bliss. She'd known he loved her, then, and for that few seconds it didn't matter, any of it. She was home.

"I feel like you're a stranger," she says, looking at him. "A stranger with his face and his voice and his memories. And it's stupid, but I think he knew."

"I've always been a stranger," he says with an odd little smile that reminds her painfully of his hand, extended: _Did I mention it also travels in time?_

"You've got that wrong," she says. "You've never been -" and she stops, paralyzed by pronouns, suddenly desperate to close her eyes and make him disappear. Erase him, erase this whole stupid thing, bring herself back to last week when she was aching with need for him but still so full of hope and potential. _It's over now. He's never coming back._ It's not even a question.


	4. Chapter 4

It's the hitch in her voice that breaks him. "I'll just," he says, gesturing toward the sofa, and she nods, bringing her hand to her lips. Not a kiss; a shield. He continues to not look at her as she turns and walks down the hall. The door to her bedroom clicks shut, louder than a gunshot. The silence in the flat is stifling.

He sits, gingerly. Comfortable sofa. Tasteful shade of beige. A bit bouncy. He sees hints of her, strewn about, clues to the life she's led without him. Pictures of herself, her mum, a little boy with big eyes, Pete. A photo of her and Mickey, mugging, a zeppelin in the air behind them. He thinks of what she said, about kissing Mickey and thinking of him, and feels heat flash through his chest. Jealousy that she was kissing Mickey? Excitement that she was thinking about him? Despair, because she'd said _him_ and not _you_?

His thoughts are a frantic, wordless jumble in his too-small brain, uncontrolled hormones and unfamiliar impulses making him feel as though he's stuck inside a wind tunnel. He's surprised by how knackered he is. Exhaustion feels like a pillow over his face. Is this what he has to look forward to? Forty, fifty years of decreasing energy and soul-numbing heartbreak? His hands itch to tinker with something, rewire the heating circuitry, check her electrical system for optimal output. He can hear Rose undressing in the next room and the synapses fire again, the urge to go after her so strong he has to grip the arm of the sofa to hold himself back.

Kicking off his shoes almost angrily, shrugging out of the jacket that feels two sizes too small. Doesn't know where to put things - a pile on the floor? Folded on the coffee table? The simple act of sleeping is fraught with so many unexpected pitfalls. For example: the loo. Should he use it now, or later? There's only one, probably, and he doesn't want to presume. Also, he has no toothbrush. Some of his incarnations had dodgy teeth, but he's rather vain about this set. His only set, now. He's no longer someone who can forget to floss.

And in the morning - he doesn't want to think about the morning. Doesn't want to think about any of it, really. Not today, with his disappearing TARDIS, the joyful smiles of the people he'll never see again, the look of blossoming grief on Rose's face as they stared at each other on the beach. Not tomorrow, when they will have another awkward not-conversation and he will have to decide whether it would hurt worse to leave now or later. If he can compartmentalize - and he's always been very good at compartmentalizing - he might be able to keep it from driving him mad.

From behind a closed door, he hears Rose opening and shutting her bureau, sliding between the bedclothes, sighing.

He tells himself he had no expectations. There was no time, although the minute the other him said the words _Dårlig Ulv Stranden_ he knew what was to come. It had been a shock, to be sure. Up to that point he'd assumed Rose was where she belonged - with the Doctor in the TARDIS - and he'd have to love her knowing he'd never have her. Not like he, the eternal _he_, wasn't used to that. But then the beach, with the ocean crashing and the sound of the screaming Daleks still echoing in his head, Donna and the Doctor finishing each other's sentences and Rose kissing him, _him_, while the universe sealed them in like a prison. His holier-than-thou counterpart believing he'd given them both a gift. Believing they were his, to give.

He was right about the lack of words. He doesn't have the language to express the way this is destroying him. Has always destroyed him, although now there's the added bonus of having given up his life, his home - not _his_, but his in all the ways that matter - all for love of Rose Tyler. The sort of grand romantic gesture he'd always mocked and secretly coveted.

And all she wants is the part of him that could never give that to her.

He tells himself he had no expectations but that's a lie. He can see with eyes that aren't his eyes her brilliant smile as she ran toward him, feel his hearts (only one now, such a strange thing, like he's broken) hammering in his chest as his feet skimmed across the street, thinking only of reaching her.

Somewhere, the other Doctor is standing in the rain. He doesn't know how he knows that.

_I would. I would let the water soak me to the skin, partly because I've just given up everything that matters to me and my body is numb and distant, partly because I'm a melodramatic bastard. And then I'll go back to the TARDIS, to the last home I'll ever have, and I'll tell myself I did what I had to do._

He buries his face in a cushion - Rose hasn't thought to bring him a pillow or a blanket, not that she should - and weeps for Donna, for what the man who is also him has done to her, and also for himself. For knowing.

He doesn't know who Rose weeps for.


	5. Chapter 5

_"What d'you think?" Preening and grinning through his new teeth. Completely unprepared for her look of utter shock. _

_A small, bewildered voice: "Who are you?"_

_Pause. "I'm the Doctor."_

_"No... where is he? Where's the Doctor? What have you done to him?"_

_"You saw me, I- I changed... right in front of you."_

They're both having this dream, possibly, or it could be just one of them, broadcasting it across the silence of the flat like a too-loud television.

_"Can you change back?" Her voice, small and hopeful and lost._

_"Do you want me to?"_

_"Yeah."_

_His face falls. "Oh."_

_"Can you?"_

_"No."_


	6. Chapter 6

It's morning, sunlight streaming in through the slatted blinds, and Rose is contemplating his toes.

He has ugly toes.

Has she ever seen his feet before? She'd remember, surely. She remembers things like the hollow of his neck and an expanse of forearm when he'd roll up his sleeves (which wasn't often, but usually involved breathtaking amounts of technobabble) and that one time with the pyjamas. So she must have seen his feet at least once, but they look completely unfamiliar to her now. Alien. How can a man with such beautiful hands have such ugly feet?

His face is slack as he sleeps, and seeing him sleep is almost as weird as the thing about his feet, which are poking, uncovered, off the end of the sofa. His top half is huddled under his jacket, and she realizes with a pang that she didn't offer him a blanket. Didn't offer him anything, not even the tea, really, though she'd at least put that somewhere he could reach.

He seems smaller than she usually pictures him, smaller and more breakable. One of his hands is under his jacket; the other is curled just under his chin. His breath whispers in and out between his lips, and she remembers kissing him, again. Which isn't surprising, because everything reminds her of kissing him. She'd waited so long for that, for the freedom to grab him by the lapels and smash her mouth into his, and it just figures that when she finally got to do it he was someone else.

Not someone else. The same. It's like a regeneration, she repeats, like it was before, only now there are two of them. One who is hers, and the other, who is the one she wants.

God. This is crap.

There's a knock on her door, and Rose jumps. She turns quickly to answer, hearing him snort and rustle behind her, pushing away the thought that she'd like to be the first thing he sees when he wakes up.

"Good morning, sweetheart," Jackie greets her, all obscenely good cheer and deep-fried pastries. "I've brought donuts."

Rose turns, shooting a glance at the couch, but he's retreated to the loo. She doesn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

"Come on, then," Jackie says, hustling Rose into the kitchen. Rose puts on a kettle. She keeps her back to her mother for as long as she can, busying herself with the finding of mugs, the gathering of spoons.

"The couch," Jackie says, her voice arch.

"What? I barely know him."

"That's a laugh."

"No, mum, I mean it. Things are complicated."

Jackie purses her lips. "Didn't stop you from swanning off with him in the first place, did it? You'd barely met the man and away you went, leaving me to think you were dead. A year, Rose. Don't think I forgot."

"Mum."

"And I don't imagine you were sleeping on his couch that whole time, either."

"Oi!" Rose fumbles, spilling tea leaves across the counter. "How many times do I have to tell you, it wasn't like that."

"But you always wished it was." Jackie's voice is quiet, quieter than Rose has heard in a long time. "And now it can be. If you let it."

Rose feels her eyes pricking with tears. "It's like - it's like I _want_ to, you know? But it's wrong. This, this is all wrong." She's going to start crying again, and that's just not acceptable. "You saw. How hard I worked, how hard I tried. But he didn't want me, mum. He didn't want me."

They both look up when they hear the Doctor clear his throat from the doorway, looking anywhere but at Rose.

"I've brought donuts," Jackie repeats, when no one speaks.

Rose pushes past them both, her hand pressed to her mouth. After a moment they hear the door to her room slamming shut.

The Doctor slides down with his back against the cabinetry and crouches there, bonelessly, head in his hands.

Jackie considers patting him in some way. "Just give her some time," she says instead.

"Time. Time is the problem, isn't it? I don't know how long we've got. Jackie, I'm human now. I'm aging, hurtling toward death, and it's a good thing this didn't happen in my first incarnation because - well, let's just leave that. What if -" he swallows, pulls at his hair in a way that makes it stand up, all crazy angles. "What if it's never right? What if I remind her too much of -"

"You great pillock," Jackie says, shaking her head and stepping over him on her way to the door. "I meant this morning. Give her some time this morning. A good cry and a shower and she'll be right as rain."

"How can you know that?" he asks, peering up at her through hollow eyes. Defeated.

"She ran off, didn't she? I know my Rose, and if she truly thought you were some stranger, she wouldn't have cared that you'd heard her pouring her heart out. Jut give her some time," she says again. She glances down at him on her way out. "Maybe she'll even take you shopping for some proper clothes. That suit of yours is a bit naff, don't you think?"


	7. Chapter 7

Time. He still feels it, like the knowledge of his pulse. Feels it, but can't see it, and isn't that strange?

The things he can feel: Rose's mouth, kissing him so hard he saw stars. The hum of the TARDIS. The click of the switches in his hands while he made the decision his counterpart never would have made. The hurtling sense of joy as the Daleks burned.

Rose emerges from the shower, dressed in jeans and a tee shirt, to find him deeply engaged in the consumption of breakfast.

He looks up at her. "I'm dangerous," he says. The effect is slightly dampened by the ring of powdered sugar around his mouth.

"Don't be daft," Rose says, sitting across from him and peering into the pastry box. "If he really thought that, he'd never have left you with me."

"He's me." She doesn't respond. "Which means he's dangerous. Dangerous and in some strange form of denial. Possibly consumed by self-loathing, certainly megalomaniacal. Aren't you afraid of me?"

"Given that you've just eaten that entire box of donuts, yes, I am a bit afraid of you. And you could've saved me a jelly."

He looks guilty. "Did you want one?"

"Obviously not."

Rose gets up, takes her mug and the one in front of him and brings them into the kitchen. He hears a clatter as she begins washing up.

He follows, watching her back, the fall of hair over her shoulders. Wanting her so badly it hurts. Knowing he can't have her, which hurts worse, but at least it's a familiar pain. He knows what it's like to love without hope, specifically to love Rose Tyler without hope. It's almost like slipping on a comfortable pair of old shoes.

"I never would have," he tells her. She stops what she's doing but doesn't turn around. "No matter how long you waited, how much I wanted to. I never would have said it."

She doesn't say anything, just keeps scrubbing at a dish he's pretty sure is clean.

"I just want you to know. Because I have his thoughts and his memories, but I _am_ different, Rose. That's the difference. Well, the primary difference, anyway. Well. Aside from the biology, which is a whole separate issue and should be classified as such. But it's fascinating, if you're interested in that sort of thing, which I am. Did you know that I can -"

"Is there a point to all this?" she asks, and he thinks he might hear a smile in her voice. Can't be sure, but he thinks so.

"I don't have to carry the weight of time anymore," he says softly. "It leaves my arms open for the things I do want to hold on to."

She snorts. He looks at her sharply. "That was such cheese," she says, turning toward him, and he's pleased to see the ghost of a grin on her face.

He grins back, wider than he means to. "Rose Tyler. I'm baring my soul to you, and all you can do is snort?"

"Sorry." Her grin disappears and he feels his chest constrict. "And I know."

He wants, suddenly, to stop. Just step away from whatever she's going to say, skip to the next bit, push a gigantic cosmic pause button. But instead he just looks at her, his eyes drinking in her pale skin and still-damp hair, the lines around her eyes and her full lips curling over her teeth. Memorizing her, in case this is the last time he can stand this close to her without bursting into flames.

"I know he never would have said it. I'm not stupid. It wasn't about that. The Doctor I fell in love with," and his chest constricts further, making his hands into fists, driving his fingernails into his palms, "he couldn't have loved me back. Not properly. But I didn't care. Thought I could love him enough for the both of us, and he'd give what he could, and one day I'd wither and die and he'd be able to think _There goes Rose. She loved me with all her heart._" She looks at him brightly, her eyes shimmering with something like tears.

He starts to speak, but she holds up a hand. "Or maybe that's a lie, maybe I thought I could change him," she says. "I did change him. I saw the way he was when it started, and the way he was at the end, and maybe I thought it could be better. That we. We could be better."

The Doctor clears his throat. _I wanted that, too_, he could say, and it would be the truth, though perhaps in the wrong tense. There was a reason he'd never discussed things like this with her. He'd suspected it would be much like an evisceration, hearing her say these words, and he is somewhat unsurprised to find that he was not off the mark.

Different man, though. Before, he couldn't hear her say these things because he wanted desperately to reciprocate and knew he never could. Now there is just her, his entire universe, and she is destroying him, atom by atom. Something of the Bad Wolf in her still.

He'll never be able to give her what she wants. _I'm sorry. I'm so sorry,_ he starts to say, but instead what comes out of his mouth is "So why did you kiss me?"

She makes a sound like a sob, and it takes him a moment to realize she's laughing. "You really are thick, you know that?"

"What -" he starts to say, and then she's kissing him again, her tongue sliding between his powdered-sugar lips, and it's so shocking he feels for a moment that it's literal, that he's been electrocuted. Her dishwater-wet hands twine into his hair and he braces his hands on the counter, leaning into her. She is the only thing keeping him from falling through the floor.

She makes a sound, arches forward to press her body against his. He was wrong. This isn't falling: it's flying.

An indeterminate amount of time later she pulls back, rubbing her lips gently against his before resting her chin against his shoulder. He clings to her, wondering how fast his heart can beat before it kills him.

"I had to choose," she says against his cheek, and feels a funny shock again. "Reality or fantasy. If the Doctor loves Rose Tyler and can never tell her, you love me. Just me." And now she is crying, tears spilling messily over her cheeks and dripping down his neck. "And Rose Tyler loves the Doctor, they're the stuff of legend, remember, and he's you, sort of. Or you're him. I'm still not clear on that part. Which means -"

"Don't," he mutters, and kisses her, because he can.

She jerks backward. "What?"

They stare at each other, both of them breathing too fast.

"I'm very clever, Rose," he says finally, unable to stand the silence. "I know he didn't give you a choice. He didn't give either of us a choice. He left me with you because I need you, and he wasn't wrong about that. But maybe - maybe he was wrong about the rest of it."

Her eyes are stricken, and he knows he's hit his mark. Desperately, he touches her face, follows the tracks of her tears with his fingertips, before bringing his hands back down to the countertop behind her. Not willing to give up the proximity, not just yet.

"That's another way he and I are different," he says in a low voice, eyes burning into hers. "I can see things he can't. I can see that there is no joy in self-sacrifice. That denying love doesn't make it easier to bear. I can see him, Rose, gripping the console on the TARDIS, bitterly lonely and alone, and honestly believing it's the way things must be." He swallows. "I told you about the weight of time, carrying it and having no strength for anything else."

"Doctor," Rose says.

"I know now I was just afraid. That needing you would undo me. And I was right to fear that." He kisses her again, slowly and carefully. Rests his forehead against hers. "I was right."

"Listen to me, Doctor," she says. He can feel her breath on his lips. "The man who needed me most turned around and left me on the beach at Bad Wolf Bay. If all I wanted was to be _needed_, I'd have run after him and left you here with Mum."

He glares at her, feeling the edge of the counter cutting into his palms, his heart beating fast and hard. He wants to be kissing her again, caught up in the newness of it, wanting to stop her from whatever it is she's going to say. Terrified by the ribbon of hope that's begun to unfurl in the back of his mind.

"My Doctor - the Doctor I loved, before the regeneration, before Bad Wolf, before any of it - my Doctor would have shifted time and space to find me." She says this bluntly, as if it is a truth. He supposes it is. "He was broken, yeah, but with me he just...fit. He never would have left me behind on a cannibal spaceship or made me feel like this year's model or accepted that I was gone just because crossing the universes was impossible. He'd have come back to me, no matter what the cost."

"I _couldn't_," he hisses, but she isn't finished.

"He'd have split himself in half, if that's what he had to do." She regards him steadily, her eyes huge. Places her palm on his chest, the way she did at the beach. "He'd have ripped his heart out so that I could be left with the best part of him."

"What part is that?" he asks, his voice hoarse and strange.

She smiles, and it's the smile he remembers. The smile she used when there was just one of him, lonely and eternal and full of love for Rose Tyler. "The part that doesn't run away."

He thinks there was never a more perfect sentence, and he waits, patiently, for her to take it back.

"What?" she asks finally, shaking her head.

He can feel his face twisting into a grin. "Nothing," he says. He presses his tongue against his teeth. "Not a thing, nada, nope, I've nothing to say to that. You've rendered me speechless, Rose Tyler. How does it feel?"

She laughs, twining her arms around his neck. "Just shut up and kiss me," she tells him, and he does.


End file.
